Now, to get my two cents in: Jobs’ essay has given an additional boost to the chorus of folks who believe that the demise of DRM is imminent; while I do believe that the demise of DRM is inevitable, I’ve noted before that I don’t think it’s coming as soon as some would believe. On that topic, Gruber pulls an NY Times quote from an unnamed music executive:

A senior executive at one company, who requested anonymity to avoid straining relations with Apple, said that while labels might experiment with other forms of copy-protection software, “we’re not going to broadly license our content for unprotected digital distribution.”

So yes, I do believe that music and DRM will part ways, but I still expect to see a lot more “but we just tried [insert half-assed consumer-unfriendly DRM-free download experiment here] and it totally didn’t work based on this metric that we just made up” protestations before it actually happens.